Cathedrals for the Masses: Moscow Metro by Lena Liv at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

TEL AVIV.- Lena Liv (b. Leningrad, 1952) returned to her homeland after years in Israel and Italy, and followed, in the series of photographs exhibited here, one of its heroic tales: Moscow’s metro stations. With a bold, rare examining gaze she focuses on the underground halls of Moscow’s impressive metro stations, built in Stalin’s era as “Palaces for the Proletariat.” Liv photographs mostly in the early morning, before passengers crowd the stations. Only a few, refugee-like figures are seen in this group of works. They are wrapped up in layers against the cold, tossing between wakefulness and sleep. Their clinging luggage seems to have become a part of their body. Slumped along the wide stone benches, they are like refugees from a hopeless struggle. Lena Liv’s lens exposes a paradox in the metro’s heroic building work: on the one hand, the buildings were meant to contain within their monumental dimensions a human body in search of domestication; on the other hand, this is buil

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